Mass funeral ceremonies for Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei are set to begin on Saturday, more than four months after he was eliminated in the opening Israeli Air Force strikes of “Operation Roaring Lion/Epic Fury,” regime outlets said.
The multi-day funeral, which state media claimed is expected to draw up to 20 million mourners, will begin when Khamenei’s body will lie in state at Tehran’s Imam Khomeini Grand Mosalla Mosque.
The ceremonies will continue through Monday with a funeral procession along a six-mile route, followed by memorial rites in the Iranian city of Qom on July 7, Baghdad, Karbala and Najaf in Iraq on July 8, and burial at the Imam Reza shrine in Mashhad, Iran, on July 9, according to the Press TV outlet.
According to some reports, a separate international memorial ceremony is scheduled in Tehran for Friday, with heads of state and senior officials from the Islamic Republic’s allies expected to attend.
Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf on Thursday urged the public to attend the funeral, saying the ceremony should convey what he described as the nation’s demand for “blood vengeance.”
Ghalibaf, who has led negotiations with the United States, said the funeral should demonstrate that Iranians would not remain silent “in the face of arrogance” and would not forget “the blood of their imam.”
It was not immediately clear whether Mojtaba Khamenei, who was chosen in March to succeed his father as supreme leader, would attend the funeral.
The younger Khamenei was injured in the airstrike that killed his father. While it is generally believed that Mojtaba is still alive, he has not appeared in public since the start of the war, and no images or audio recordings of him have been released.
